


Lay Me Down

by dirtydirtychai



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Backstory: Vernon Boyd, Canon Backstory, Gen, Hurricane Cindy, Hurricane Katrina, Mentions of Cancer (Original Character), Off-screen OC Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-08
Updated: 2012-12-08
Packaged: 2017-11-20 14:17:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,590
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/586286
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dirtydirtychai/pseuds/dirtydirtychai
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Boyd has been living in Beacon Hills for almost half of his life, but it’s still true, or mostly true, when he explains, “I’m from New Orleans.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lay Me Down

Boyd has been living in Beacon Hills for almost half of his life, but it’s still true, or mostly true, when he explains, “I’m from New Orleans.”   
  
In a sea of new to mostly-new compact cars rife with the requisite red-and-white BHHS slogans, Boyd’s ‘92 Volvo station wagon and its faded New Orleans Saints logo stand out. Adults generally ask about Katrina, but once in awhile he gets the kind of idiot who learned about New Orleans by watching cartoons.  _Do you catch alligators,_  they ask,  _or, oooh, does your grandmother do voodoo?_  
  
“No,” Boyd says, and he doesn’t say the rest because his Mama raised him to not waste breath on fools. He doesn’t say,  _Not all black people from Louisiana practice hoodoo you racist shit,_  or _, And even if we did, you can fuck right off because I am not going to be your very own personal magical negro._  
  
“No,” he says, “she’s Catholic.”   
  
He  doesn’t tell them about Tee Minnie, who sold sno-balls in a little stand down the street from his school, whose gnarled hands he would watch as she crafted her wares for her stall in the French Market. Tee Minnie, who never gave him mysteriously ominous warnings or sage advice, who never once mentioned spirits or anything supernatural, who was mostly just quiet and a little bit cranky when her old bones started aching. Tee Minnie, who would sometimes, for no apparent reason, wordlessly press a sachet into his hands, or a doll, more natural and careful and wilder than the trinkets she made to sell.   
  
Boyd kept them in all in a shoebox under his bed, and his mother would scowl when she saw him lift the lid to slip his new acquisition inside, and Daddy would laugh and say “She just tryin’ be good to the boy, Mama, don’t do no harm.”   
  
When his father was diagnosed, Boyd went one night to her house, and she peered at him through the screen door, lips pursed, face inscrutable.   
  
She didn’t open the door, and Boyd went home late, late, that night, empty handed.  
  
***  
  
Mama had gone to UC Faro, had been teaching for two years when she’d fallen in love with Vernon Milton Boyd III. What the hell kind of a name, she’d asked, is Vernon Milton Boyd III for a truck driver?  
  
“First you hit my tow truck, then you go pickin’ on my name. You ain’t careful, I might get the idea you sweet on me or something.”  
  
She only hit him ‘cause that dumbass like to sideswiped her, she pointed out.  
  
“Yeah, I’ll send a thank you note to the hospital,” he promised, smile wide and eyes warm.  
  
He shared his thermos of coffee with her and her cousin while they waited for the police to clear the scene, and after he towed her car to the shop and saw them set up at a motel, he bought them dinner at Waffle House.   
  
Five days later, when she got the car back, Boyd’s mama sent her cousin back home to California on a Greyhound bus since she wasn’t going to be finishing out the last leg of their road trip after all.  
  
***  
  
Boyd remembers the summer his daddy died in flashes of light and gold, in the repetitious flare of orange streetlights on their drives into town, in the flickering blue-white of the generator-run hospital fluorescents. Hurricane Cindy had extinguished the once unblinking lights of the Big Easy in a patchwork mosaic of dark and light. He remembers looking out on what he could see of the eighth ward, mesmerized by the far away glow of the sparsely scattered lamp-or-generator-lit windows. They bled through the glass of Daddy’s room in ICU, flickering through the condensation like eyes in the night.  
  
MeeMaw took Boyd with her to a prayer meeting one night, a special service for his father, and the interior of the usually humble church was aglow with a multitude of candles. They took a box back with them, some brought from home, some pressed into their hands by church members, all of them newly blessed.   
  
The ride back to the hospital was long and slow. Boyd held a hoodie-wrapped votive carefully in his lap, having insisted on lighting it at the church and taking it with them, thinking vaguely of the Olympic torch he’d seen on TV the previous summer. The glasses rattled gently in the back seat as MeeMaw slowed at the hospital entrance. Her skin reflected amber where the candle light could reach. Outside, the trees and buildings blinked into existence then out again with each _tick-tick-tick_  of the signal light.   
  
***  
  
Boyd’s father succumbed to complications due to metastasized prostate cancer when Boyd was ten, when Marie was five, when Ava was three. The worst of the blackouts were over, and New Orleans was starting to come back to life. The city had gone dark just as Daddy has started to take his turn for the worse, and it had felt like all of New Orleans had been in mourning, holding vigil with the Boyd family, and this sudden return to blazing, vibrant life felt like a stunningly personal betrayal.   
  
From inside the car, Boyd sat with his drowsing sisters and watched men in coveralls repair a blown transformer while Mama and MeeMaw said their goodbyes to the priest and the last of the mourners.  
  
MeeMaw came in and turned on the radio while they waited on Mama.  _She just gone to the bathroom, baby, she be here soon. Quiet, now._  From the radio came tinny portents of damnation and hellfire. They watched the sun set on the city, the creeping dusk and the answering flares of colored neon lights. It was almost entirely dark before Mama finally slid into the driver’s seat, face puffy but eyes dry.   
  
Outside, the repairmen packed up their tools, and it began to rain.   
  
***  
  
Grammy lived in California, where Mama lived before she came to New Orleans. Boyd and the girls would say their  _hello, yes we’ve been good, we miss you, we love you_ ’s, and would then be sent away back to their rooms while Mama talked to Grammy, her voice low and weary, about how she thought she’d found a buyer for the shop, about how tired she was, about how much she hated these storms.   
  
When Mama used to complain about living in a city that was  _sinking,_ Vernon _, sinking beneath their feet,_  Daddy would laugh at her and ask if they’d be better off in the land of earthquakes, wildfires, and mudslides. It was an old argument, the tracks laid long before Boyd became aware of it, and they would follow it along to its inevitable stalemate while Boyd had listened from the back seat of the car, buckled in next to sleeping baby Marie.  
  
Two months after the funeral, Boyd’s mama shook him awake before his alarm even went off, and he helped Marie and Ava get dressed while Mama told MeeMaw over coffee in no uncertain terms that she had had enough, that Vernon was buried and the shop had finally sold and so help her, if there wasn’t a damn good reason to sit through another one of those God forsaken storms, she wasn’t going to ever again.  
  
Boyd left Marie and Ava alone velcroing their shoes on, left them just long enough to dart into his room and throw himself far enough under the bed that his fingers caught the edges of his old abandoned shoebox. Boyd grabbed what would fit into his hands without even looking, stuffed them into his jeans pockets as he slipped carefully back in to straighten Ava’s shoe ties. Boyd listened, over the loud rasp of the velcro and the drone of the weather man, as Mama set her mug down with shaky hands, her voice gone so soft he could hardly make it out. “Come with us, Maman. Please. I have a bad feeling about this one.”  
  
By 9:00 Friday morning, Mama had packed up her children, her unprotesting mother-in-law, and as many hastily packed trash bags as would fit into her station wagon. They pulled out of the driveway three days into her two weeks’ notice.   
  
***  
  
Motels weren’t that exciting, it turned out, to Boyd’s disappointment. They saw no cowboys in Texas, and Boyd was so busy playing I-Spy with Marie that they nearly missed the sign when they passed through the town of Vernon.   
  
The car was familiar and smelled like the home they’d left behind. The dull roar of the engine and the constant monotone of the radio conspired to lull the children into convenient sleep while Mama and MeeMaw grew quieter and quieter.   
  
Saturday morning, they got a late start, Mama and MeeMaw absently allowing the children more donuts than they could eat while all the grownups in the lobby stood scattered around the TV.   
  
Sunday morning, they went to a church Mama found in the motel phone book, and Boyd and the girls obediently lit candles like MeeMaw told them to. They didn’t leave Albuquerque til well after 1, and Mama drove hard that day and all that night, car grim and silent but for the sound of the radio.  
  
They pulled into Beacon Hills some time before daybreak. The girls were still sleeping and Boyd ate breakfast with Grammy in the living room, sipping from his own small cup of sweet coffee. They watched coverage of the levees breaking over grits and toast while Mama held MeeMaw and cried.

**Author's Note:**

> So many thanks to [SweetPollyOliver](../users/SweetPollyOliver/pseuds/SweetPollyOliver) ([obstinatecondolement](http://obstinatecondolement.tumblr.com/)@Tumblr) and [FireEverything](../users/FireEverything/pseuds/FireEverything) for their encouragement and betas.  
> A slightly augmented version of this will eventually become part of obstinatecondolement's [Queer Advocacy Group AU](../series/25778). 
> 
>  Also [here](http://dirtydirtychai.tumblr.com/post/36977668900/lay-me-down) on Tubmlr.


End file.
